Facebook: Friends are always mutual, and require a request. You can choose which posts are publicly available, and which are for friends.
Twitter: All posts are public, unless you have set your account to private, and then followers will need to request.
Mastodon: Private or public accounts. Every post has one of four privacy levels, which can't be changed later, and there is a multidimensional matrix that describes what posts can be seen by what users from where at what time.
This matrix AFAIK is not documented anywhere in full, and is hard for users, even long-time ones, to learn and understand.
This combined with the complexities of federation and I'm honestly surprised that it's garnered such an audience.
@elomatreb those "details" and "most" are unfortunately important enough for me to have to consider them constantly
@impiaaa I'm curious, where and when? I'm sorry to say that I very rarely consciously click the visibility button (except maybe for DMs), maybe I'm just missing the problem
@elomatreb things to consider: Is this a reply? Who is this a reply to? Who else is in the conversation? Who of them have been blocked or muted by whom else?
From those, will it show up on the public timeline? Can it be boosted? Can it be seen on the web interface?
@impiaaa Maybe I'm a Masto-noob, but how do I need to consider who blocked who? The only thing I do with replies is untag people when a conversation moves on, I usually just leave it on whatever clicking the reply button got me.
Boosting is a valid concern, hadn't considered that
@elomatreb If someone in the thread has you or your instance blocked, muted, suspended, or silenced, they can't see your reply (but again, there's an exception, if they follow you).
But the untagging thing brings up another interesting point, that replies without a mention act as less-than-unlisted, since they also don't show up to mutual followers (something I've seen on emojidon)
Twitter has oddities like this, but they are mostly documented, and none of them are front-and-center.
@impiaaa Because it Just Works™ unless you want to get into the details, public toots are public and replies don't show up in timelines for the most part